July 2008 Entries

Thanks to all who attended the London .NET User Group meeting last night, a great turnout and lovely weather for slurping beers in the streets of Clerkenwell afterwards. As promised you can download the slidedesk for my CI Factory grok talk from here, and if yoiu want an extended version I'm presenting at NxtGenUG in Oxford on Wednesday 6th August. In the one hour or so I'll hopefully have time to actually create a SubVersion repository, edit the CI Factory setup file to create a new build server ......

After a month of owning my new laptop I've written up a series of posts 'Liam buys a new laptop' about how I made the choice of a HP 6910p laptop, what accessories I bought and my initial impressions of Vista 64-bit as an operating system. Part 1 – Which one to buy? Part 2 – Laptop inflation, accessories add another 50% - oops! Part 3 – First impressions of my new Vista 64-bit development platform ......

Operating system installation The first thing with any new PC is to configure the hard disc partitions, update the device drivers and get on with installing the rest of your software. The HP backup and recovery wizard happily burnt my recovery DVDs which were tested on the upgraded 320Gb hard drive. The recovery process created a recovery partition, an o/s tools partition (quickly deleted) and installed Vista Business (32-bit) complete with all the HP drivers on a single huge 300Gb C: partition. ......

In Part 1 of my blog series, I described the partisan decision process that led me to buy a new HP 6910p laptop. Having decided on teh laptop to buy, the only question, how much will it eventually cost? There were always going to be immediate upgrades; the 120Gb hard drive was always going to be too small (it was replaced by a 320Gb model) and I was always going to replace the 2Gb of RAM with a 2 x 2Gb dual channel matched pair. The unexpected bonus I had was managing to get hold of a model with ......

Just over month ago I finally upgraded from my aging HP nc6000 laptop. Equipped with a Pentium 1.6M and 1.5Gb it wasn’t an ideal platform for Windows Vista, Visual Studio 2008 or virtualisation engines. I was also really feeling the lack of dual core CPU oomph compared to my desktop setup. I had been tracking a candidate for a replacement laptop for some months, a HP 6910, although I nearly bought a Dell Latitude D630 (but a waiting time of more than 60 days put me off). I knew I was in for a world ......